Happy Release Day, ALL FOUR STARS!

Today is the day! Tara's ALL FOUR STARS is officially out. To celebrate, I'm reposting a classic from my now-defunct "Massacring the Art of French Cooking" series. It was great while it lasted, and this post was the first. I hope you enjoy! (I'm also giving away a signed hardcover of ALL FOUR STARS, so don't miss the details at the bottom of the post!)

Today is my birthday, the big two-six. Now I tell you that not to solicit your happy birthdays (although you're welcome to leave your best birthday songs in the comments, if you like), but as an explanation for why we baked a cake.

Some friends invited us over for dinner Monday night, so we decided to turn it into an early birthday celebration and offered to make dessert. So we needed to bake a cake and, since it was going to be my birthday, not just any cake--the great Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba, a chocolate and almond masterpiece rumored to be Julia Child's favorite cake.

We first encountered the mighty Queen when we rented JULIE AND JULIA several weeks ago. My husband and I are closet foodies, so JULIE AND JULIA sounded interesting to us both. (Yeah, my husband's pretty cool like that.) By the end of the movie, all we had to do was take one look at each other, and we knew: We needed a copy of MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING.

Now French cuisine is to the culinary world what Shakespeare is to the literary one: that aged sage who seems more myth than truth, whose works are thick and incomparable and define the entire discipline. So the Queen of Sheba is more than just a cake; it's an aspiration, a distant mountain peak, a legend.

We made sure we had all the right ingredients and equipment. We made a special trip to procure the things we lacked. And then we started baking. My husband separated his first eggs (six of them, no less--the Queen doesn't trifle with silly things like baking powder). I beat my first egg whites (until soft peaks started to form, then added a tablespoon of sugar and kept beating, until there was nothing soft about them). We folded everything together. And then we eased our cake rounds into the oven and set the timer for twenty-two minutes (three less than Julia called for, just in case our oven wasn't properly French).

Twenty-two minutes later, when I inserted my fork exactly three inches from the edge (should have been a needle, but I figured a tine was good enough), it came out a little dirty. Three more minutes on the timer, then another fork into the cake. This one came out clean. Which meant it was time for the final test: the jiggle.

According to Julia, the center of the cake should "move slightly" when jiggled. The whole point of the Queen is to leave her slightly underdone so as to preserve her creamy texture.

So we jiggled. And got nothing.

There was nothing we could do about it by then, of course, so that was exactly what we did. We iced her as if nothing unusual had happened (in nearly half a pound of butter mixed with four squares of baker's chocolate), we pressed a few leftover slivered almonds into her sides, we took her to our friends' place. And when it was time for dessert and I sampled the first bite, I knew: We'd ruined her. The Queen of Sheba was as dry as a slab of day-old bread. Chocolate and almond day-old bread, but day-old bread, nonetheless.

What makes this an even greater tragedy is the fact that we're on a no-dessert diet for the next month and a half. Our health insurance company does these wellness challenges, and for each one you complete, you get a partial refund on your premiums. So the first wellness challenge is to not eat or drink any desserts, treats, or soda for two months. Two whole months. You do get a few free days, so you've got to make the most of them. And we wasted one of ours on the over-baked Queen.

Still, we will not be defeated. We refuse to be bested by the French. So we're planning to crack that cookbook again in about a week and give another recipe a try. If our next attempt is a success, I'm sure you'll hear about it. And if our next attempt is as, uh, massacre-ful as this last one, I'm sure you'll hear about that, too:)

And now for the giveaway! To enter, just tell me in the comments that you'd like to win (and for an extra entry, feel free to share your most epic kitchen disaster). Contest is open to US and Canadian residents and closes in two weeks, on Wednesday, July 23, at 11:59 p.m. EDT (or 8:59 p.m. PDT). I'll select a random winner the next day.

Book Recommendation: WE TWO (Plus a Long Subtitle) by Gillian Gill

Honey Bear and I checked out the movie The Young Victoria the other day (we never see anything in theaters anymore), and I LOVED it. I loved it so much that I decided I needed to find out more about Victoria and her German prince. (Who also happened to be one of her first cousins. Hey, don’t judge. They did that a lot back then. Too bad no one informed them about the genetic risks…) So I checked out Gillian Gill’s WE TWO a few days later--and loved it just as much.

WE TWO is split into two parts: The first details the Queen’s and prince’s early lives (the Queen is always capitalized, by the way, to the utter dismay of capitalization rules), and the second describes their life together. What’s more, WE TWO doesn’t map things out strictly chronologically; rather, it treats its material thematically on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Ms. Gill picks up a story thread (such as the Queen’s daughter’s engagement to the surprisingly adorable heir of Prussia) and follows it through to its conclusion, then backs up several years and picks up a parallel thread.

A lot of WE TWO surprised me. For instance, Victoria despised having children (although she ended up having nine) and wasn’t a terribly affectionate mother. On that same topic, she never had a miscarriage (a feat for any woman in any century, let alone the nineteenth), and all of her children grew to adulthood (which is even more impressive when you find out her youngest son, Leopold, had hemophilia).

But perhaps the biggest surprise was that Albert wasn’t quite as, uh, swoon-worthy in real life as he was in The Young Victoria. He wasn’t nearly so in love with her, at least at first (although Christopher Hibbert’s biography offers some evidence to the contrary (yeah, I’m currently reading Hibbert’s brick-like QUEEN VICTORIA:) )), and he was more than a little misogynistic. Albert was definitely a product of his times, and I like to think The Young Victoria explored the man that would have been had he been raised in this century.

The subtitle I failed to mention, “Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals,” really says it all. Both the writing and the subject matter of WE TWO thoroughly engaged me, and I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about England’s longest-reigning monarch and her beloved prince.

P.S. Honey Bear and I also attempted another recipe from MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, but I decided not to blog about it because the dish turned out so well:) For all my fellow culinary experimenters, you might try cotes de porc poelees (with gratuitous accent marks I’m not even going to attempt to reproduce, page 386 in the teal-and-orange edition) with the mustard, cream, and tomato sauce mentioned on the next page.

Massacring the Art of French Cooking: Boeuf a la Bourguignonne

Hour Six. The kids are finally--finally--in bed, the dinner eaten, and the leftovers in the fridge. The kitchen is a wreck, but I’m too tired to clean it. No, tired is too gentle a word. I am spent. I am exhausted. Boeuf a la bourguignonne is an unforgiving taskmaster.

Hour Zero. We hadn't attempted a recipe from MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING for months, but Honey Bear was determined to try one this week. We settled on boeuf a la bourguignonne (which you can find on page 315 in the cheerful teal-and-orange edition), and though we knew it would be an ordeal, we figured it would make up for all our months of culinary negligence. Plus, we figured it’d make a good blog post:)

Hour One. Honey Bear came home from work an hour or two early for the express purpose of making this meal. We started by boiling bacon. (Yeah, you read that right: Boiling. Bacon.) That took about ten minutes. Then we browned the bacon (?) and the beef, which we’d had the foresight to cut into cubes the night before. What we hadn’t had the foresight to do is cut them into decent-sized chunks. No, our meat cubes were a little bigger than the sugar variety, and as they all had to be seared on every side (so they wouldn’t release their juices over hours and hours of simmering in a big black pot), we spent a lot of time browning beef.

Hour Two. Still browning beef. I’d wanted to have the stew in the oven by the start of hour two, but alas, it wasn’t to be. After the beef was finally browned, we still had to sauté the vegetables (two out of the three members of French cooking’s Holy Trinity, the carrot, onion, and celery), which took another five or ten minutes. Finally, about halfway through hour two, we added grape juice and beef stock to the pan (the recipe called for “full-bodied, young red wine,” but since we don’t cook with that, we used grape juice instead), then stuck it in the oven to simmer away for two to three hours.

It was about this time that I scurried off to use the bathroom (since I’d had to go for, like, the past forty-five minutes), leaving Honey Bear to start the brown-braising of the small white onions by himself. I got back just in time to see him peeling the last of the onions while they were cooking in half an inch of beef stock--no small feat, I assure you--with the help of our meat tongs and a short blade. (Apparently, Julia hadn't been very clear on the difference between peeling and skinning until halfway through the recipe.)

Hour Three. We actually had a few minutes of peace at the start of this hour--from the boeuf a la bourguignonne, anyway. Our kids had woken up from their naps, and now they wanted our attention. I tried to entertain them while Honey Bear read up on the next stages of the Great Supper, which, at Julia’s suggestion, was also going to include boiled potatoes and buttered peas.

Halfway through this hour, Honey Bear set to work on the potatoes and started prepping the mushrooms. (Wait, mushrooms? There are mushrooms in this stew?)

Hour Four. The stew was almost ready to come out of the oven, so it was time to get those peas going and start sautéing the mushrooms, which we were supposed to add to the stew after it had finished simmering. Now, to be honest with you, Honey Bear and I don’t really like mushrooms, but in the interest of being one-hundred-percent faithful to Julia, we decided to make them, anyway.

Finally, (almost) two full hours later (yeah, we cheated on the time, but after three hours of full-time cooking, we decided we’d earned the right to a few shortcuts), we pulled the stew out of the oven. It looked about the same as it had two hours before. Still, we persevered. We poured the stew into a colander, catching the juice-and-stock mixture in a saucepan so we could reduce those juices to a glaze. Five minutes later (Julia said it would only take “a minute or two”), we were still reducing. The sauce wasn’t much thicker than juice and stock normally were, but by that point, we hardly cared.

As we dished everything up, Honey Bear said he hoped it tasted good. I said, “Nothing tastes as good as this should taste.” After Honey Bear took his first bite, I asked him how it was. He said, “It takes like stew meat.”

Curse you, Julia Child! (But you have to say that how Dr. Doofenshmirtz would.)

All right, all right, so the sauce was actually pretty good. Not three-or-four-hours-of-constantly-chopping-searing-or-stirring good, but pretty good, nevertheless. If you have company coming over and you want to impress them with your French culinary skills (not to mention your French pronunciation), give boeuf a la bourguignonne a try. If not, just take my word for it and save yourself the trouble.

Massacring the Art of French Cooking: Bifteck Saute au Beurre

That’s French for “steak you cook in a pan, with butter,” which, according to Julia, is very French. (I’m thinking it’s very everywhere, since it’s, you know, STEAK, but maybe that’s just me. (All right, all right, so it’s probably not very Indian, since it’s, you know, cow, but definitely everywhere else. (And on the topic of India, have you ever seen a Bollywood flick? Because that is one experience nobody should miss.))) And since we had a few leftover steaks from a super-duper sale, we decided to give it a try.

We ran into trouble almost immediately. Julia calls for the steaks to be three-quarters of an inch to a full inch thick; ours, despite being labeled “petite cut,” were closer to twice that. Also, while Julia insists the perfect steak is medium rare--and so only gives that cook time--Honey Bear and I prefer ours medium to medium well. Which meant we had to take a guess at how long to grill the first side, and decided on ten minutes.

Still, we set the timer for eight, as if we wouldn’t remember to check them, then proceeded to stare at the bubbling butter-and-oil concoction in the bottom of the pan for the next seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The timer’s cheery beep-beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep-beep roused us from our vigil, and for some unearthly reason (I think it had something to do with the meat not looking much different from the top, but the details are sort of fuzzy now), we barely glanced at their bottoms before deciding they needed those last two minutes.

We chickened out after only fifty seconds, though, and attacked them with our tongs. And a good thing we did, too: When we finally flipped our non-petite-cut, hopefully-medium-to-medium-well steaks, they looked more like the remains from a Chernobyl butcher shop--huge, charred, and quite possibly radioactive--than anything we were supposed to eat.

I looked at Honey Bear. He looked at me. I said, “At least they’ll make a good blog post.” He looked back at the steaks and mumbled, “Yeah, but I wanted them to make a good dinner.”

We finished them off as best we could. After giving them a few more minutes on their other sides, Honey Bear took them off to rest while I deglazed the pan (my first pan-deglazing, by the way). And then we sat down to eat our Soviet-inspired bifteck sauté au beurre with deglazed pan juices.

And you know what? They weren’t that bad. Sure, the crust was kind of thick and, well, burnt, but it actually tasted kind of good. (Butter and olive oil covereth a multitude of culinary sins.) And even though our steaks weren’t exactly medium, or medium well, they did retain (most of) their juices and were moist enough to chew through. So on the whole, I’m calling this one a success--right up there with the Soviet nuclear power program:)

Massacring the Art of French Cooking: Reine de Saba

Today is my birthday, the big two-six. Now I tell you that not to solicit your happy birthdays (although you're welcome to leave your best birthday songs in the comments, if you like), but as an explanation for why we baked a cake.

Some friends invited us over for dinner Monday night, so we decided to turn it into an early birthday celebration and offered to make dessert. So we needed to bake a cake and, since it was going to be my birthday, not just any cake--the great Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba, a chocolate and almond masterpiece rumored to be Julia Child's favorite cake.

We first encountered the mighty Queen when we rented JULIE AND JULIA several weeks ago. My husband and I are closet foodies, so JULIE AND JULIA sounded interesting to us both. (Yeah, my husband's pretty cool like that.) By the end of the movie, all we had to do was take one look at each other, and we knew: We needed a copy of MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING.

Now French cuisine is to the culinary world what Shakespeare is to the literary one: that aged sage who seems more myth than truth, whose works are thick and incomparable and define the entire discipline. So the Queen of Sheba is more than just a cake; it's an aspiration, a distant mountain peak, a legend.

We made sure we had all the right ingredients and equipment. We made a special trip to procure the things we lacked. And then we started baking. My husband separated his first eggs (six of them, no less--the Queen doesn't trifle with silly things like baking powder). I beat my first egg whites (until soft peaks started to form, then added a tablespoon of sugar and kept beating, until there was nothing soft about them). We folded everything together. And then we eased our cake rounds into the oven and set the timer for twenty-two minutes (three less than Julia called for, just in case our oven wasn't properly French).

Twenty-two minutes later, when I inserted my fork exactly three inches from the edge (should have been a needle, but I figured a tine was good enough), it came out a little dirty. Three more minutes on the timer, then another fork into the cake. This one came out clean. Which meant it was time for the final test: the jiggle.

According to Julia, the center of the cake should "move slightly" when jiggled. The whole point of the Queen is to leave her slightly underdone so as to preserve her creamy texture.

So we jiggled. And got nothing.

There was nothing we could do about it by then, of course, so that was exactly what we did. We iced her as if nothing unusual had happened (in nearly half a pound of butter mixed with four squares of baker's chocolate), we pressed a few leftover slivered almonds into her sides, we took her to our friends' place. And when it was time for dessert and I sampled the first bite, I knew: We'd ruined her. The Queen of Sheba was as dry as a slab of day-old bread. Chocolate and almond day-old bread, but day-old bread, nonetheless.

What makes this an even greater tragedy is the fact that we're on a no-dessert diet for the next month and a half. Our health insurance company does these wellness challenges, and for each one you complete, you get a partial refund on your premiums. So the first wellness challenge is to not eat or drink any desserts, treats, or soda for two months. Two whole months. You do get a few free days, so you've got to make the most of them. And we wasted one of ours on the over-baked Queen.

Still, we will not be defeated. We refuse to be bested by the French. So we're planning to crack that cookbook again in about a week and give another recipe a try. If our next attempt is a success, I'm sure you'll hear about it. And if our next attempt is as, uh, massacre-ful as this last one, I'm sure you'll hear about that, too:)